For centuries, wood has been the recognized and sought after material of choice for use in flooring of homes and buildings. In centuries past, wooden planks or panels were cut and hewn by hand. However, since the early 1800s, machines have been developed for efficient cutting and planing of machined wood flooring. Unfortunately, the machined flooring lost much of their hand-hewn or individualistic appearance.
In recent decades, the types of wood flooring have expanded to include solid wood flooring, engineered flooring (which is made from several layers of wood and often designed to withstand higher levels of humidity), and laminate flooring (which typically comprises a faux wood image applied to a base of particle board). Typically, the machined or engineered flooring products are produced to have a generally smooth, machine-finished appearance.
There is a growing demand for textured panels having a surface effect that simulates the antique and aged appearance of old beams and planks that were hewn out of logs by hand with an adze or an axe. In order to reproduce the “distressed” or worn appearance of old wood floors, flooring companies have devised ways to artificially distress the planks. Generally, these distressing operations have involved the use of extensive manual labor to produce a random distressed appearance. The manual distressing process is generally accomplished using combinations of hand tools and hand techniques. Many do-it-yourself television shows provide instructions to individuals, demonstrating how to distress wood using techniques such as hitting the wood with hammers, chains, and other hard materials that create dents and cuts of different shapes and sizes. As may be appreciated, such a process can be very time and labor intensive.
Alternatively, machining has been used to attempt to produce a hand-hewn appearance. Typically however, machine distressing of the panels has generally produced a “machined” distressed appearance that has a noticeable or repeated pattern. Thus, there is a need for apparatuses, systems and methods for producing a hand-scraped or distressed appearance to surfaces of flooring panels.